PostScript 3 font download

To directly answer your question, Adobe does not directly supply such fonts to end-users. Typically, host versions of such fonts are distributed by the printer vendor themselves.

That having been said, there is absolutely no advantage to using the resident fonts of PostScript devices. Why? The original idea behind resident fonts was to improve performance of printing PostScript files. When the first PostScript printers were released in the mid-1980s, communication between the host computer and the print device was excruciatingly slow typically with RS232 serial ports, Apple LocalTalk ports, and early, slow parallel ports. Having printer-resident fonts that you could count upon dramatically cut the amount of data that needed to be downloaded from the host computer to the printer.

But the world has changed dramatically:

(1)    For over 20 years, we have had very high speed connections between host computers and printers (Ethernet - wired and wireless, USB 2+, etc.) making the transmission time for fonts negligible.

(2)    There has been a veritable explosion in the number of fonts available for use with applications on Windows and MacOS. Users didn't want to be nor would they accept being limited to the small collection of resident fonts for these printers.

(3)    Both PostScript-centric publishing applications as well as OS PostScript drivers are very efficient at downloading only the necessary parts of fonts required by the print jobs to printers within the PostScript job streams. And these applications and drivers can handle newer font formats such as OpenType (including OpenType CFF, OpenType TrueType, OpenType Variable, and OpenType SVG) fonts that can't be directly handled by PostScript that require conversion on the host to either Type 1 or TrueType (Type 42) fonts.

(4)    We live in a multilingual world in which the limited character sets of the old printer-resident fonts have proven to be totally insufficient.

(5)    Over the years, the host-based versions of the printer-resident fonts of the same name have grown far apart in terms of encoding, metrics, glyph counts, etc.

Overall, the best strategy with regards to printer-resident fonts for both PostScript and non-PostScript fonts is to simply make believe they don't exist and take advantage of the fonts you want and need and that are installed on your host desktop/laptop computer.

               - Dov